All Chapters of THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Callum’s fingers found mine with the quiet precision of someone used to leading others into danger disguised as duty. His touch was warm, grounding, unshaking. The opposite of me. We stood together beneath the vast golden arch at the very top of the grand staircase—two figures framed by the breathless grandeur of the Moonlit Ball. The world below shimmered like a pageant in amber, gilded and waiting, the ballroom swelling with silence as soon as we stepped forward into the light.I could feel the moment catch.The chandeliers—wrought in twisted glass and phoenix-gold, hovering midair like captured constellations—tilted ever so slightly in our direction, their enchanted filaments flaring brighter as if to anoint us. Magic stirred the air. The ambient hum of violin strings softened to a hush, allowing the crisp tap of a distant heel, the clink of a glass being set too hard against a saucer, to punctuate the stillness like a pin to a balloon. Dozens—no, hundreds—of faces turned upward, t

I did not mean to look at him—did not want to. The intention was never there, only the inevitable gravity of it, the impossible weight that seemed to curl around my spine and tilt my chin upward before I had the presence of mind to resist it. My gaze flicked upward, brief as a breath held too long and released too suddenly, and in that fragile moment—barely more than a blink—I met his eyes.And the world, for a heartbeat, ceased its turning.Atlas Blackwood stood not ten feet from where I stood frozen, and though there were people all around us, pressing in with polite murmurs and silken laughter and the rustling hush of formalwear sweeping marble floors, I could not hear a single voice, nor see a single face. There was only him, carved in shadow and candlelight, tall and terrifyingly still in his dark maroon tailored coat that gleamed faintly beneath the ballroom's golden glow like it had been stitched from starlight and grave intentions.My breath caught—or perhaps it never made it

I snapped open my eyes into the absence of light.Not the soft, velvet black of a night sky or the gentle hush of closed eyes in a quiet room, but a swallowing dark—primordial, breathless, alive. It folded around me like an endless curtain, damp and pulsing with a silence so total it throbbed behind my ribs. There was no wind. No ground. No up or down. Only me—and the deafening echo of nothing.I couldn't remember standing, yet somehow I was upright, suspended in that void like a drop of ink suspended in water. My body felt slow, heavy with something I couldn’t name. My arms moved, but not easily, as if time itself had thickened into syrup and I was sinking through it second by second. I opened my mouth to speak, to call out, to scream, but no sound came. Even my voice had abandoned me here.Then I saw her.Far ahead—though distance had little meaning in this place—there was a flicker. A glimmer, almost like light, but red. Luminous and pulsing, the color of raw blood beneath skin. My

Light found me first.Not the warm flicker of dawn nor the amber hush of twilight, but something colder, paler—thin and sterile, diffused through something distant. It pressed behind my eyelids like a memory I hadn’t meant to keep. It wasn’t cruel, not exactly, but it held no warmth, no welcome—only persistence, like fingers trailing down the spine of a book I hadn’t meant to open.I didn’t move at first.My breath was shallow, like the echo of breath rather than breath itself. My limbs were numb, not in pain, just… removed. As if I were thinking about my body from somewhere else. It took time—time I couldn’t name—for me to blink. And even when my lashes parted, it was slow, deliberate. The light didn't sear, but it felt wrong, like I wasn’t supposed to be here, like this place had been meant for someone else.A ceiling greeted me.Plain. Pale. High. It was laced with faint cracks, delicate as frost on glass, stretching overhead in branching patterns too fragile to follow. I stared at

The air outside the infirmary felt heavier than it should have, too still, too watchful—as if even the walls had been waiting for me to reappear. Healer Kathy’s final words, kind but perfunctory, echoed dully in my mind: “You're clear. Just take it slow.” As if slow could undo the way my bones trembled with residual tension, or as if anything short of turning back time could fix what had already been seen, already been whispered, already known. The linen bandage around my wrist was clean, neat, clinical—no sign of the storm that had passed through me.Callum waited just outside the door. His hands were in his coat pockets, the collar turned up to shield against a chill that wasn’t entirely physical. He didn’t smile when he saw me. Not out of indifference—but something else. Worry, perhaps, or restraint. A muted expression worn by someone who understood the weight I now carried and wasn’t quite sure how to lift it with me.He fell into step beside me without a word, a quiet sentinel wi